The Rundown (2003)

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It's all part of the Hollywood food chain: Wrestlers like Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson become actors. Actors like Peter Berg become directors. Directors like Woody Allen slowly become irrelevant. And here's a twist for the future - reality television stars become wrestlers (read: The Miz from Real World X: Back to New York), adding another layer on top of the already rickety foundation of the studio system.

In The Rundown - Berg's follow-up to the delightfully morbid Very Bad Things - Johnson (The Scorpion King) makes a good case for people to start taking his new career more seriously than those of "Rowdy" Roddy Piper or "Hollywood" Hulk Hogan. He plays a "retrieval expert" named Beck who is quick and powerful enough to, quite literally, defeat the entire offensive line of an NFL team, should the situation ever present itself (and it does). But Beck is also an aspiring restaurateur who agrees to perform the heavily clichéd One Last Job for his vile boss, Walker (William Lucking)

The job finds Beck headed to Brazil, where he is to bring back Walker's son, a college dropout named Travis (Seann William Scott, American Wedding) who is after a potentially bogus Holy Grail of archeological wonderment called El Gato Diablo. Which means the rest of the film plays like a double exposure of Midnight Run and Romancing the Stone, with Rosario Dawson (The 25th Hour) as a third wheel who helps the boys take on the ruthless slave driver (Christopher Walken, Gigli) of a mine town quaintly dubbed Helldorado.

The shockingly restrained Johnson is legitimately charismatic here, merely because he isn't trying to be The Rock (he doesn't raise the People's Eyebrow once!). Berg's direction is solid, if a little too flashy at times. Dawson's inflection is the least Brazilian I may have ever heard, while Ewen Bremner (Black Hawk Down) contributes one muddled and funny enough to be the finest unintelligible movie accent since Brad Pitt's in Snatch (which, coincidentally, also featured Bremner). The Rundown could have been a really great action-comedy if its ending were a little less silly and if it had gone for the R rating. Or even if it had bothered to explain Beck's hang-up with guns. Peep the tributes to recent newsmakers Arnold Schwarzenegger (a brief cameo), Johnny Cash (a song on the soundtrack) and Bob Lonsberry (horny monkey sounds).

1:44 - PG-13 for adventure violence and some crude dialogue

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X-RT-RatingText: 6/10